A referee who applies the rules differently depending on who is wearing what jersey is not being fair; they are being corrupt. I spent enough time coaching football and rugby to know that, and the principle scales perfectly to constitutional law. What began as a defense of universal human rights has morphed into a system of special rights distributed by identity and grievance. The result is an erosion of equal justice that should concern anyone who still takes the rule of law seriously.
Hate crime sentence enhancements illustrate the problem precisely. The underlying crime—assault, murder, vandalism—already carries stiff penalties. Layering additional time because the offender uttered an offensive word transforms the courtroom into a tribunal on thought rather than conduct. Consider two men in a bar fight: one hospitalized. If the attacker stays silent, he faces standard charges. If he mutters a slur, the sentence spikes. The victim's broken ribs feel identical either way. The law has decided that the accompanying vocabulary made the injury worse. That is the state auditing thoughts, a power that historically ends badly for everyone involved.
The constitutional problem is plain. Motive-based enhancements create a hierarchical structure of victims at odds with the equal protection guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment. The FBI's 2024 Hate Crime Statistics recorded 11,679 incidents and 14,243 victims. What those numbers cannot show is how consistently prosecutors seek enhancements across victim categories, a discretion-heavy process where identity politics almost inevitably seeps into charging decisions. The Constitution says equal protection. It does not grade that protection by the victim's group membership. When it does, courtesy of sentencing statutes, the result is law that contradicts itself.
The DEI regime in hiring and admissions operates on the same logic: some identities receive preferential treatment; others absorb the cost. The FAA's air traffic controller debacle made the stakes concrete. During the Obama years, the FAA scrapped a validated skills-based aptitude test in favor of a biographical assessment engineered to diversify the applicant pool. Andrew Brigida scored a perfect 100 percent on the original merit exam and was rejected anyway. A class-action lawsuit documents that more than 3,000 qualified applicants lost their spots. An internal FAA document from 2013 bluntly asked how much performance degradation was acceptable to meet diversity goals. Congress forced the agency to drop the biographical assessment in 2018; Trump's January 2025 executive order mandated a full return to merit. A decade to correct an obvious error is a long time when you are stacking aircraft over major airports.
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Boeing's trajectory reinforces the point. Diversity targets were written into executive bonuses in 2022, years after the 737 MAX crashes had killed 346 people. A door-plug failure on an Alaska Airlines flight in January 2024 prompted a federal investigation and a Senate subcommittee report concluding Boeing had substituted production speed for quality control. By October 2024, CEO Kelly Ortberg had eliminated the DEI department and rebuilt incentives around engineering and safety. The market corrects what ideology cannot.
The Supreme Court agreed, at least in the admissions context. The 6–3 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC struck down race-based admissions as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Harvard's class of 2029—the first fully post-ruling cohort—showed Asian American enrollment rising from 37 percent to 41 percent, confirming that merit-based selection does not require institutional engineering to produce a capable student body. Many universities responded to the ruling not with compliance but with proxy criteria and reframed essay prompts designed to replicate the banned outcome. That is not compliance. It is contempt with a compliance-shaped veneer.
The cultural cost compounds quietly. When people are sorted by victim status, they stop believing effort determines outcomes. I have seen that on coaching fields, and I hear it from parents in my own community: children monitoring their words in classrooms, afraid to speak freely. That is not an abstract concern. It is what institutional cowardice produces when it is allowed to run for a generation.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made the relevant demand plainly: judge people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. That is not sentiment. It is a constitutional standard, and it cuts against every identity-sorting mechanism the federal government currently administers. The question is not whether the country has an obligation to reckon with past wrongs; it does. The issue is whether the method used to achieve this could also be discriminatory. The answer the Equal Protection Clause gives is no.
The remedy is consistency, nothing more. Apply hate crime enhancements uniformly or repeal them—punish the act, not the accompanying vocabulary. Eliminate identity preferences in public hiring, contracting, and education. States that adopted color-blind policies did not collapse, and their workforces did not become homogeneous. Restore merit as the definitive criterion in any field where an error has mortal consequences. Teach the next generation what the Declaration and the Fourteenth Amendment actually say: every individual stands equal before the law. Human rights belong to everyone by virtue of being human. Special rights belong to some and not others, which means they are not rights at all—they are privileges, distributed by whoever currently controls the machinery of government. History is clear about which arrangement produces strength and which produces stagnation. The choice should be obvious.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
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